Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of contact center software, and more particularly to the field of monitoring or recording contact center agent performance using screen capture of an agent's actions taken on a computer while handling customer interactions.
Discussion of the State of the Art
An important aspect to be considered in managing any contact center (or call center, which is a contact center handling only phone calls) is to take steps to ensure that the quality of interactions with customers is as good as can reasonably be achieved. The measurement of quality, especially when considered as the measurement of quality as perceived by a customer, is a challenge of great difficulty. In order to facilitate both measurement of service quality and to monitor performance of customer service representatives (typically referred to as “agents”, which term will be used herein), it has become commonplace for some or all calls to be recorded in order that the calls can be listened to, at later more convenient times and using various sampling techniques, by professionals referred to as “quality monitors”. Virtually all contact centers of any size have a full-time staff of quality monitors.
In addition to listening to the audio content of a call, it is advantageous to also be able to see what an agent was doing during the call as well. For example, by seeing what an agent was typing as a caller recounted a particular problem which required service to resolve, a quality monitor might be able to identify a training issue (as when an agent is found to be so focused on typing word for word what a customer is saying that the agent misses the point the customer was trying to make, or when an agent incorrectly classifies a call and thereafter sends it to an incorrectly chosen specialist). Because of the obvious utility of capturing both audio and screen capture records of what transpired during a service incident (or call), the use of screen capture technologies has become a mainstream element of modern contact centers.
Unfortunately, systems that capture screens of agent desktops during calls tend to be quite expensive, require dedicated technical staff to maintain, and generally store their screen capture data locally (along with audio call recordings). These facts mean that screen capture is often not carried out by smaller contact centers, which do not have the budgets or the technical staff needed to implement, maintain, and use such systems. Additionally, many larger contact center operators have found it difficult to maintain separate call monitoring databases at each contact center site, and have moved toward centralized administration and storage of call monitoring records (by which is meant audio and screen capture recordings). However, even for large organizations, maintaining centralized call recording systems has proven challenging and expensive. In addition, for large corporations, the cost and technical challenges of keeping large amounts of agent desktops up to date (since each of them generally has had to have a dedicated screen capture application running on it, which communicates with the centralized recording storage systems) have proven to be significant. And finally, as contact center outsourcing (which primarily means outsourcing the work of contact center agents) has expanded worldwide, a problem has emerged because it is difficult for a large enterprise to keep multiple outsourcers up to date with their screen capture solutions—and for outsourcers the problem is even worse, as they typically have to build integrations and stay current with multiple clients' different approaches to call and screen recording.
At the same time as these problems have become pressing in traditional, premise-based contact center systems (that is, systems where the hardware and software used reside on the premise of the contact center or in a nearby data center operated by the same company), cloud computing has emerged as a major new paradigm in business (and consumer) computing. In cloud computing, physical resources are located away from users, accessible via the Internet to users from many enterprises. Deploying software “in the cloud” holds great promise for enterprises, as it promises to provide ready to access to the latest, highly-tested versions of each application without the enterprise having to manage the software maintenance process.
From the perspective of call and screen recording, cloud-based computing is perhaps even more promising. A single cloud-based vendor can easily build, integrate, and maintain a solid, well-tested platform for call recording and screen capture, and can then make it accessible to many clients (enterprises) with minimal setup times. Moreover, cloud-based solutions are typically paid for as they are used, so what was once a significant capital expense that was hard to size (enterprises often tend to buy more than they need for normal operations, since they plan for peak period usage) has become a highly-variable operating expense (surging for peak periods is usually quite simple, and the extra capacity is only paid for when used).
Given the challenges in screen capture solutions, that have limited their use in small contact centers, in large, multisite operations, and in or in conjunction with outsourcers, a shift to cloud-based solutions offers very compelling advantages. However, existing efforts to deploy screen capture from the cloud have generally involved installation of a specialized software application on the desktops whose screens are to be recorded, with the result that adoption of cloud-based screen capture solutions has been limited to specialty applications to date, and has not been adopted much in the contact center world.
What is needed is a cloud-based screen capture solution suitable for use in call centers both large and small, and with or without outsourcing, that does not require any permanent software installation on agent desktops.